1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of data processing systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to retrieving data from a directory stored in a data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for implementing adaptive buffer management on network fetches of directory contents and object attributes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Remote file systems, such as Network File System (NFS) Version 4, provide methods for a client to request file directory information from a server. Along with the file names, various attributes of each entry may be requested. The processing required by the server to provide the various attributes of each entry is costly as the processing involves lookups and other file system operations. Additionally, the amount of data that is transmitted to the client could become massive if attributes are requested for a large number of files. The problems associated with the amount of data to be transmitted become more problematic when the size of the attribute data is not fixed.
Often, it is desired for a client to request a full set of attributes for each directory entry so that a cache table may be configured to bypass further requests to the server. The client must supply a limit on the amount of total data retrieved. If the threshold is set too high, excessive memory allocation can occur. If the threshold is set too low, the number of directory entries returned from the server is limited.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method to address the above-mentioned limitations of the prior art.